Wait, wait, I’m quite good at this you know…
Swiss?
Tyklfe,
The problem with that scenario is that no matter what, I truly believe that any moronic IT person (and there are many out there) should be able to look at your network and know very quickly what is going on with your network.
If you are placed in the hospital because of a coma, your inability to perform your job does not make the business slow or shut down because you are sick, ill or dead – or simply fired. Business is business and we all are expendable.
I know you grinned a lot over that comment but I have seen networks that make no sense what-so-ever. Business relies upon their networks to be pretty straight forward.
I will get my shorts outa my ass but I still think that a straight forward approach is the best way to go. Our lack of thought as IT managers makes life difficult for businesses if we get silly in our naming conventions, do things that are out of the ordinary, etc… Yep I am a stick in the mud when it comes to things like that. I am fun (so I like to think) but certain areas I become pretty much a pain in the butt. 
Looks like you got a lot of great suggestions, but my wife and I came up with a few that weren’t mentioned.
As an American I liked the British warship named after adjectives. The HMS Defiant, Audacious, Invincible…
My wife came up with a few off-the-wall ones:
Serial Killer (Gein, Bundy, Dahmer…)
Infectious Diseases (Ebola, Hanta, Influenza…)
In a flash of inspiration (inspired by this very thread), I’m considering renaming my network:
Tolkien nouns. At the end of Lord of the Rings there is an index of all the people, places, and things mentioned throughout the book. The index is about 20 or 30 pages long, so I’ll never run out. 
It might be fun to name them after great ideas/concepts/projects that went horribly wrong (these are PC’s after all): Titanic, Hendenburg, Star Trek: Voyager…
Or maybe name 'em after bad actors (never a shortage there!): Shatner, Hasselhoff, VanDamme, Yasmine Bleeth…
Or great actors: Geilgud, Hepburn, Guinness…
Or maybe just “well-loved and/or very popular actors”: Connery, Gibson, etc…
techchick68: Although I realise you’re talking sense in the wider general picture, it doesn’t really matter much what I name the machines in my particular case - we’re talking about the network names on 20 workstations in a small office LAN.
I used to work at the Research Service at the Swedish Parliament and all the printers there had insect names. Cricket, Moth, Dungbeetle, Spider, Tsetse Fly etc.
/Andreas
One more for the mix. I work at a huge company that makes submarines. All our nodes are named after old subs (which incidently were named after fish). I am currently working on “gudgoen”. Rolls off the tongue doesn’t it.
I actually agree, I was just being humorous. (or at least trying) I work for a major Telecom company and I know and understand the virtues of a well thought out naming convention